Alkek Library News

Overcoming Information Overload with our Avatars

This tutorial gives you strategies for dealing with information overload in your research project. You need 1) context for your project 2) identifying the best sources and 3) a more specific idea.

List of e-reference sources from the Alkek Library.

If you need more specific help, get in touch with us.

Get Better Biographies with Biographies in Context

Biographies in Context is one of our reference databases. It provides detailed biographies of notable (not always superfamous) people - political leaders, musicians, artists, scientists, business leaders and more.

You can also search by type of person - say, Jamaican artist born between 1900 and 1920...

We like this database because it provides historic or artistic context as the case may be. Also, Wikipedia could suffice for the most famous people (still not recommended), but our database will cover less famous (but still important) individuals.

 

Research Tip: Find Influential Articles with Citation Analysis

Here's something to help you in your research: find the most cited articles in your field.

Chances are they are among the best written and most influential in your area. True, an article may have been overlooked and the most recent articles (however good) haven't been cited yet. But this is a cool trick if you're getting overwhelmed with too many search results.

So choose one of the citation databases links here, and search by topic, author or other parameters. Be sure to select by most cited (system defaults to most recent).

 

Use Startpages to Organize Your RSS Feeds & More

One of the coolest new tools I've been using lately is NetVibes startpage. A startpage is a personalized web homepage. Others include: iGoogle, Pageflakes, and MyYahoo. I've chosen Netvibes because you also have a public version you can share with others socially. (Pageflakes also has this feature.) Here is my Netvibes public page. Notice the different tabs .

On both the private and public page, you can choose what modules and widgets to add.  Netvibes already has many to browse and choose from. If you already have a delicious, facebook or flickr page you can have them fed to your startpage. See the larger view of the image by clicking on it.

You can also create different tabs to organize your feeds. I have one for blogs, database & journals feeds, and one I have created for research feeds for a presentation I am giving.  Tabs help to organize your RSS feeds according to how you want to view them.

On the private page, you see the same modules as on the public page plus you can add a widget to monitor your email from your different accounts in one place, have a calendar, weather widget, and more. Its as easy as clicking the "add content" button, pasting the RSS feed URL into the box and adding it to your page.

Most databases will allow you to subscribe to a search query or the latest articles from a particular journal. Use the databases help feature or look for the RSS image to find out how.

Here is a nice comparison of different startpages that discusses the different features of each one. At the bottom of the post is a chart that puts all the features together for easier comparison.

Watch the library workshop page for future workshops in late summer or the fall semester on setting up personalized startpages. Or follow the links above to create your own startpage now.

Added: Hoover's First Research Industry Profiles

The library is happy to announce the add-on of Hoover's First Research Industry Profiles. It's located within Hoovers.

This is an industry survey style business database that breaks down the structure of an industry and its current challenges and opportunities.

The reason we acquired Hoover's First Research Industry Profiles is the context that it gives to the industry information. Hoover's explains the overall nature of the industry, specific terms, the raw materials the industry requires, and the typical capitalization and profitability of the industry. Then, it discusses current opportunities and threats that industry faces. We also found the categories of industries to be more up to date than some other databases. It's a winner.

Compare to the industry and market data inside Business and Company Resource Center, Business Insights, Marketline, Market Research and Standard and Poor's. These are all good, but Hoover's brings some much needed context to the table.

Happy New Year! Learn how to use Refworks before you start your research papers.

First, I should introduce myself. My name is Tara Spies and I am the newest addition to the Alkek Library Information Literacy Instruction Team. I am a Reference/Instruction Librarian and my subject specialties are art/design, communication studies, and technology. If you have any questions about research in those areas you can contact me at ts20@txstate.edu or want to request an instruction class in any of these areas with me please don't hesitate to do so.

It is the beginning of the spring semester so it is probably a good time to learn about new and improved research tools before your research gets underway. If you don't already know about Refworks, you will wish you had once you know that it is a online citation and bibliography tool that you can use to help you organize and format your citations/references for your research papers in whatever writing style you are supposed to use (APA, MLA, etc.). You can create a free account and familiarize yourself with some of its basic features. You can use their tutorial or attend one of our upcoming workshops on how to use Refworks. Once you get the hang of it you will see what a helpful tool Refworks can be for citing sources in your paper and for your reference/bibliography page that you put at the end of it.

Refworks just released a new version of Write-and-Cite that will let you download and use it while offline. The online version is still available for when it is more convenient for you. You can read about more new enhancements to Refworks in their January 2008 Release Notes

Good luck with your spring semester!